By TED MANN
On the map showing the dozens of bike-share stations that will soon freckle northwestern Brooklyn, there is just one neighborhood-size void in the network: the ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave of South Williamsburg.
It won’t be the first time religious residents in the area, many of whom are members of the Satmar Hasidic movement, have won exemption from citywide bicycle infrastructure. This time, according to interviews with residents, community leaders and city officials, deference to local sensitivities came without the shouting matches, pedaling protests and arrests that marked a 2009 battle over a bike lane bisecting the neighborhood.
Publicly, at least, South Williamsburg became a bike-share-free zone with hardly a peep from religious leaders.
For planners at the city’s Department of Transportation, the Hasidic hole on the bike-share map indicates the successful solicitation of public feedback.
“I think it’s really important that the stations meet the needs of the communities,” the city’s transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, said in an interview. “We’re not really looking to put them where there isn’t a lot of demand.”
Yet an absence of bike-share stations also underscores the lingering tensions separating secular cyclists and their religious neighbors in this corner of Brooklyn.
Where Pedestrians Are Preferred
“The women come through on bikes, and they’re not dressed properly,” said Joel Weiser, a Hasidic musician who lives in the area, echoing complaints heard during the backlash that forced the removal of a painted bike lane on Bedford Avenue. “They’re more naked than clothed.”
Local leaders like Isaac Abraham, a former member of Community Board 1, insist that keeping bike sharing at bay is a strictly nonsectarian preference, pointing to safety concerns instead of a cultural divide.
“When you [ride] through Williamsburg, you’ve got 5,000, 10,000 children crossing the area,” Mr. Abraham said. “If you can’t be careful, then please find yourself another way to drive through.”
While DOT officials emphasize the agency’s sensitivity to local interests when plotting bike-share locations, some in Williamsburg see a double-standard that runs contrary to the spirit of the new system.
“In order to have this whole program work, it has to be laid out so there isn’t a hole—and there’s a clear hole,” said Ryan Kuonen, a community board member who favors biking. Such a gap, she argued, poses a problem for the very system the city has pledged to provide: a hop-on, hop-off network to shorten walking commutes and connect neighborhoods poorly served by mass transit.
And Ms. Kuonen has no doubt how her Hasidic neighbors view the outcome: “They for sure are looking at it like they won.”
More than 400 kiosks holding 7,000 blue CitiBikes will be part of the initial deployment for the launch of bike sharing in New York City next month, dotting Manhattan below 69th Street, a quadrant of Brooklyn and a bit of Long Island City, Queens. By next summer, an additional 200 docking stations will complete the first phase and will expand further into Brooklyn and Queens and Manhattan north of Midtown.
Transportation officials held more than 250 meetings with community boards and the public to lay out the bike-rental stations. The DOT’s website attracted 73,000 comments and suggested locations.
“New Yorkers drew the maps,” Ms. Sadik-Khan said of the painstaking, month-long process, which included sessions at which residents annotated maps with stickers.
Council Member Steve Levin, from neighboring Greenpoint, Brooklyn, recalled a meeting where residents living near his home adamantly petitioned for a station east of McGuinness Boulevard, a long walk from the nearest subway station. At the same meeting, he said a conspicuous lack of participation by Hasidic residents in the district made their preference clear.
“Nobody showed up to that meeting advocating for a preponderance of bike-share stations on those blocks or in that part of the neighborhood,” Mr. Levin said. “If people really wanted to see bike-share stations in South Williamsburg, they would have come to those open meetings and said so.”
Community silence isn’t the same as consensus. Some in the Orthodox world believe there is a reluctance to be seen embracing bikes against the wishes of well-connected religious leaders.
Back when Baruch Herzfeld was running Traif Bike Gesheft—Yiddish for “non-Kosher bike shop”—he found great demand among local Hasidim for his rental bikes, which he often lent out free.
“I always heard them say, ‘I wish I could ride a bicycle,’ and I’m like—’Why don’t you ride a bicycle?'” recalled Mr. Herzfeld, an Orthodox Jew who said he was disappointed by the lack of bike-share stations in the area.
“It would be nice if there was some proactive way of getting them to embrace it rather than avoiding it,” he said of bringing biking to his neighbors. “It would just take some political courage.”
The exclusion of one Orthodox Jewish enclave isn’t likely to undermine the city’s bike-share system, which is based on a model that has proved successful in cities like Washington, D.C. and London. But additional abstentions could weaken the network—and South Williamsburg isn’t alone in pushing back.
Some residents in Brooklyn Heights have circulated a petition against the neighborhood’s bike-share locations. Activists in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay, among other neighborhoods, are organizing against the imminent arrival of the bike borrowing.
“To install two big bike-share stations here and outsize stations elsewhere in our community is a recipe for trouble,” said Bruce Silberblatt, part of a group hostile to depots around Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at East 47th Street. He worried that bicycling tourists would indulge in illegal rides through the quiet plaza, crowd the sidewalks and deprive drivers of scarce parking spaces.
Much of the attention isn’t negative at all. At a recent City Council meeting, Ms. Sadik-Khan was peppered with so many requests for cycling facilities that she felt compelled to remind lawmakers that she is “not the commissioner of bicycles.”
“Most of what I hear is, ‘How come there’s not a station that’s closer to me?'” she said. “There are parts of Brooklyn where if you stop walking for a second, someone is going to chain their bike to you.”
Ms. Sadik-Khan and other supporters of bike sharing hold out hope that direct experience with the new program will make customers of even those hostile to the coming of the CitiBike. DOT officials are even planning to offer incentives for potential users on the fence about trying it out.
But Ms. Kuonen, the bike activist in Williamsburg, sounded moderately less hopeful about a change of heart among her Hasidic neighbors.
“It’s kind of silly,” she said. “They live in New York City. New York City is getting bike share. It should be where they live, too.”
—Danny Gold contributed to this article.
Write to Ted Mann at [email protected]
